Month: November 2017

The 2016 elections exposed just how broken our election methods are. Now we have a chance to start changing that!

On Tuesday November 14 an initiative petition to institute STAR Voting for Lane County offices was filed at the Lane County Elections Office in Eugene. A parallel campaign is being organized in Portland for Multnomah County. If enough signatures are collected in each respective county, the initiatives will appear on their November 2018 ballots.

Doesn’t force a voter to choose between more than one candidate they like,

Gives equal weight to each voter’s vote, and

Produces a winner with wide support.

In STAR Voting voters can score each candidate in the general election on a scale from zero to five, including giving two or more candidates the same score. Scoring candidates is similar to the familiar zero-to-five star scoring we use for products or movie reviews.

The two candidates with the highest overall scores are entered into an automatic runoff without the need of a second election. Each voter’s vote goes to the finalist who they scored higher, and the candidate who was scored higher most often wins.

STAR Voting builds on the long history of studying alternative voting methods by combining features of Score (or Range) Voting, Instant Runoff Voting, and Top-Two Elections, for a simple, integrated system that improves on all of them.

If the Lane County initiative passes, offices such as the county commissioners, the sheriff and the district attorney would be elected using STAR Voting instead of the current Top-Two voting method. For county elections STAR Voting has the added attractions of eliminating the cost and bother of a primary election and reducing the prospect of only one candidate appearing on the November general election ballot.

Mark Frohnmayer and Alan Zundel, both long-time activists for voting reform, are the chief petitioners for the Lane County initiative. Mark is a software and clean technology entrepreneur who was the Chief Petitioner in 2014 for an initiative to create a Unified Primary and is the founder of Equal Vote. Alan is a former political scientist who was instrumental in last year’s successful campaign to allow Ranked Choice Voting in Benton County and recently served on the Secretary of State’s task force to reform Oregon’s redistricting process.

Once the petitions are approved after review in each county, signature gathering will begin.

Volunteers for Lane County can contact lane@equal.vote, and volunteers for Multnomah can contact PDX@equal.vote. For news of the campaigns you can follow the STAR Voting Facebook page, and for more information on STAR Voting see the Equal Vote website.

Interested parties in Multnomah County are invited to join a planning meeting on Sunday, November 19th from 3-5 pm at Lucky Lab, 1700 Killingsworth in Portland. If attending please RSVP sara@equal.vote.

The Lane County campaign is currently accepting donations but only by check at the present time. Checks may be made out to “STAR Voting for Lane County” and mailed to:

I guessed that the plan to refer single-payer health care to the ballot was a way for state legislators to “pass the buck” to voters so they would not antagonize powerful interests such as the insurance industry.

According to Charlie, SB 1046 was introduced as a way to move discussions forward and build support in the legislature. It was not expected to get out of the Senate Health Care Committee, and it had only a courtesy hearing there.

He writes, “We knew before the session started that we were not going to try to convince the health care committee to move the bill forward, though at that time we were hoping for a courtesy hearing in both the house and senate health care committees.”

The bill was not regarded, even by HCAO, as ready for action. There are still many considerations about the best way to shift costs for health insurance from the private sector (for example, premiums, co-pays and deductibles paid by employers or individuals) to public insurance. The amount needed is also uncertain and subject to various factors.

Funding considerations are a major aspect of a single-payer plan, and still need more discussion, research and reflection to create a sound plan.

In any event, a single-payer bill will entail provisions for raising revenue, which in Oregon requires a 60% super majority in both legislative chambers, not a simple majority. Even if all Democrats backed it, it would still need Republican support, unless there is a large shift in party representation in the legislature.

(As an aside, State Senator James Manning recently claimed at a meeting of Our Revolution Lane County that if Democrats could gain “six seats” in the 2018 election, they would pass a single-payer bill. They are currently one seat short of 60% of the seats in each chamber.)

But even if a bill did pass the legislature, it is virtually certain someone would institute a referendum on the bill, placing it on the ballot to give the voters a chance to approve or disapprove of it. As it will end up in the voters’ hands anyway, it would be much easier to move it forward in the legislature by asking them to refer it to the ballot in the first place.